There are Islamists living in Tennessee who are top tier leaders in ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), one of the unindicted co-conspirator organizations named by the Muslim Brotherhood in its plan for the U.S.. This plan was exposed during the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing prosecution.

There are Islamists living in Tennessee who are individually named in that same Muslim Brotherhood plan, and Islamists who have served in executive positions with Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and the MAS (Muslim American Society), both designated as terrorist organizations by the UAE.

CAIR’s executive director who visits Tennessee has publicly voiced his support for HAMAS. CAIR has inserted itself multiple times in Tennessee events, even trying to prevent Tennessee citizens from exercising First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly. In 2013 CAIR’s Michigan director was brought to Nashville to train Muslim high school students in political activism. Currently CAIR has a de facto office in Nashville since its former CAIR-Houston director registered as a Tennessee lobbyist and is running the American Center for Outreach (ACO).

A former CAIR intern worked with the UT Knoxville MSA (Muslim Students Association) and was on the faculty of the private Islamic school in Knoxville. Another former CAIR chapter leader was the self-appointed Vanderbilt University Muslim chaplain who confirmed during a public event that he must abide by Islamic law that commands death for homosexuals.

Guest speakers known to be radical Islamists have been brought to Tennessee with messages like “Islam is better than democracy” and that under sharia law “the kafir [non-Muslims] won’t be equal with the Muslim.”

Deeds to some Tennessee mosques list Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Imams preaching inside the mosques are trained in Saudi Arabia where the strictest form of sharia law is practiced or are trained at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, which is credited with starting the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood movement, promoting Islam and sharia as a complete way of life.

Tennessee even has a mosque whose mortgage is held by an organization working on behalf of the Iranian government.

Tennessee is home to the leader of an Islamic organization which shares many attributes with the Holy Land Foundation that was shut down by the U.S. government for providing material support to HAMAS.

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Our elected and appointed political leaders should be required to receive complete and factual information about the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups operating in Tennessee because these groups represent the politics of Islam. These groups and individuals should be exposed.

Our citizens should also know these facts. Watch for the next seven installments in this series.

The Boston Marathon bombers’ mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), employs an intensive radicalizing program aimed at Boston’s historically moderate Muslim community, especially at its youth. It’s called “Tarbiya,” which is Arabic for “growth and refinement.” It is not something that is practiced as part of classical mainstream Islam.

APT has obtained several curriculum documents created by ISB-affiliated groups, which describe exactly what is taught and when, with assignments detailed down to book and page number. We are making the most detailed and traceable of these documents available here and here. We will focus in this article on a particular Tarbiyaprogram called “Young Muslims,” which was explicitly endorsed by Suhaib Webb, the Imam of the ISB’s mega-mosque in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. It lists books that all participants must read, and even includes page numbers for specific assignments (the document was formerly available at the program’s website, and can still be accessed through an archived version of the site).

The authors of many of these books are among the “Who’s Who” of radical Islamic ideologues. A lot of the books are available in the Boston Marathon bombers’ mosque’s library. Major focus is given to books by Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; Said Qutb, the father of modern jihadism; Maulana Maududi, the father of political Islam on the Indian subcontinent; and Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom the Anti-Defamation League calls the “Theologian of Terror.” Some of the books on the “must read” list have nothing to do with Islam, such as several books written by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore. Having young Muslims read a curriculum that includes far-left atheist authors of Jewish and Christian backgrounds shows that the goal of Tarbiya is not just to develop a Muslim’s spirituality, but also to develop within him a deep animosity to Western democracy.

The ISB and its political arm, the Muslim American Society (MAS), are very open about the program’s existence and even havewebsites dedicated to it. MAS teaches Tarbiya at each of its dozens of chapters across the United States, and the entire national Tarbiya program happens to be led by the Imam of the Boston Marathon bombers’ ISB Cambridge mosque, Basyouni Nehela. MAS describesTarbiya in these terms:

MAS aspires to raise a generation of committed and disciplined Muslims who will spread the message of Islam and implement the Movement’s vision in all fields of Islamic work[.] … MAS delivers a rigorous educational curriculum to its current and potential members … The focus of Tarbiya is to groom members who… are equipped with the necessary knowledge, understanding, and skills to make a difference in the society by taking an active role, both individually and collectively, in the reform process that seeks the betterment of our community, our country, and the whole world.

The description of the program makes it seem like yet another benign new-agey spirituality and growth system. That is because, while it is openly advertised, the extremist and jihadist aspects of its curriculum are not – both for the sake of keeping this radical indoctrination from outside scrutiny and for the sake of keeping it, at first, from the Muslim youths who are thinking about joining it.

Indeed, a “Young Muslim” first entering the program will not be reading any extremist authors for a very long time. The first phase of the program is dedicated to completely legitimate religious learning. Participants read the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. They learn about the life of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad, and they study the importance of the Five Pillars of Islam: declaration of faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage.

But soon, those participants who show a high level of dedication, zeal, and religiosity, of willingness to internalize everything that has been taught to them, are told that simply praying and giving charity are not enough. At this next stage of Tarbiya, they are assigned books, such as Let Us Be Muslims by jihadist ideologue Maulana Maududi, who provides them with the core Islamist idea: Muslims need to be more than pious; they need to rule over all mankind:

Brothers in Islam! The Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving, and Pilgrimage are so important that they are described as the pillars of Islam. They are not, however, like the worship rites in other religions. […]

These acts of worship have in fact been ordained to prepare us for a greater purpose and to train us for a greater duty… What exactly is that great ultimate purpose? Stated simply: the ultimate objective of Islam is to abolish the lordship of man over man and bring him under the rule of the One God. To stake everything you have – including your lives – to achieve this purpose is called Jihad.

Having thus channeled the zealous young Muslim’s sincere religious devotion into an extremist agenda, the third stage of Tarbiya indoctrination consists entirely of incitement to violent Jihad, hatred for America, and of Western civilization in general. It is in this stage that young Muslims study in detail the Islamist corollary to Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto: Said Qutb’s Milestones, which outlines a road map to establishing a global Islamic State ruled by Sharia law. It is Said Qutb who inspired Osama Bin Laden. According to Qutb:

All Jewish and Christian societies today are also ignorant societies… Islam cannot accept any mixing with this ignorance… One should accept the Islamic law without any question and reject all other laws in any shape or form… The abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching… It must employ Jihad.

By the time a young Muslim Tarbiya participant reaches this phase, he has already bought in to all the indoctrination in the previous phases that brought him there. The books he studies in the third phase, such as To Be a Muslim by Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leader Fathi Yakun tell him:

A Muslim must always worship Allah and wage jihad until death in order to reach his ultimate goal… Obedience for a Muslim means to obey every command and implement it whether in time of happiness or hardship, and whether one likes it or not… He will not act against the leader in agreed matters, and will be loyal to him in every action, regardless of his personal likes or dislikes… Dissociate yourself from every gathering or organization that opposes your ideological standpoint, especially when the Movement asks you to do so.

A key component of Tarbiya is not just the material taught, but the structure of the program, in which recruits are organized into intimate cells called “usras.” MAS is considered by Federal prosecutors to be the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, and the program directly follows the methods developed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s founders in Egypt. Eric Trager, an expert on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has lectured about the Brotherhood’s Tarbiya process in Egypt:

At the lowest level of the Brotherhood structure is what’s called an usra, or “family.” You can think of this as a cell. This is a group of five to eight Muslim Brothers. They meet weekly for about three hours. They discuss the Quran, religious texts, the Brotherhood’s curriculum, politics. They share their personal lives. The members of this group become a Muslim Brother’s best friends. The people that you work most closely with are in your usra. The usra is a mechanism through which the Brotherhood embeds your social relationships into the organization so that you’re less likely to disobey it due to peer pressure and you’re less likely to leave it because you’ll be leaving your best friends.

The usra is an intensive, spiritually-focused, activism-oriented program that develops the individual and invites him or her to join hands with MAS and work for the sake of Islam as a central priority in life. There are weekly assignments prior to and following each usra. Each member is expected to spend approximately 3-6 hours a week on usra and usra-related activities (usra attendance [~ 2 hours], usra assignments [1-2 hrs], dawah work (example MSA work, MAS Youth work, or other Islamic work, etc) [3 hrs], social activities [2 hours /month].) Each usra generally contains around 5-7 members.

MAS demands that those entering its Tarbiya program be “willing to be committed to the usra and hold working for Islam as a central priority in life.” ISB Roxbury Imam Suhaib Webb defines the usra as: “the usra is you’re in the ocean swimming, you’re lost, your boat sunk and suddenly you see some people on the boat, you get there and they give you a blanket and a cup of soup, that’s the usra.” All of this makes leaving the MAS/ISB program extremely difficult. It also makes it extremely likely that if a young Muslim participant is encouraged by his usra leader to do something terrible for the sake of the movement, he will gladly comply, even if this means prison or death.

Bergdahl was accused of walking away from his post and putting his fellow soldiers in danger. The trade of hardened Taliban fighters for his freedom raised deep concerns on Capitol Hill that the administration struck an unbalanced and possibly illegal deal.

With the newly announced charges, Bergdahl could also face a dishonorable discharge, reduction in rank and forfeiture of all his pay if convicted. He is not in pretial confinement at Fort Sam Houston, a spokesman for U.S. Army Forces Command said.

The announcement of the charges marks a sharp turnaround for the administration’s narrative of Bergdahl’s service and release. After the swap last year, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction.”

But as Bergdahl faced criticism from fellow servicemembers for his actions, the administration faced heated complaints from Congress over the Taliban trade itself. “This fundamental shift in U.S. policy signals to terrorists around the world a greater incentive to take U.S. hostages,” said former Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Wednesday’s announcement only fueled those concerns.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a member of the Armed Services Committee, was asked by reporters Wednesday whether the charges raised doubts about the initial trade of Bergdahl for the Taliban members.

“I would think that it would raise doubts in the mind of the average American if those doubts weren’t raised already,” Wicker said.

“This proves once again that the president’s political motivations for closing Guantanamo Bay are causing him to make reckless decisions and will put more American lives at risk,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said Wednesday in a statement.

Gen. Mark Milley, head of U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, has been reviewing the massive case files and had a broad range of legal options, including various degrees of desertion charges. A major consideration was whether military officials would be able to prove that Bergdahl had no intention of returning to his unit.

Bergdahl disappeared from his base in the eastern Afghanistan province of Paktika on June 30, 2009. A private first class at the time, he had three days earlier emailed his parents expressing disillusionment with the war.

Bergdahl left a note in his tent that said he was leaving to start a new life and intended to renounce his citizenship, Fox News reported last year.

For the next five years, Bergdahl is believed to have been held by the Taliban and Pakistan’s infamous Haqqani network. In one of several hostage videos released during his captivity, he said he was captured when he fell behind a patrol, but fellow soldiers, outraged after the trade was made with the Taliban, accused him of deserting. Some asserted that American servicemembers’ lives were put at risk in the hunt for Bergdahl.

Bergdahl was freed on May 31, 2014, after the White House agreed to trade five high-value Taliban operatives held at Guantanamo Bay.

The trade was branded as illegal by lawmakers, who said they weren’t advised beforehand, It was also blasted by critics who said it violated America’s longstanding tradition of not negotiating with terrorists. There were also concerns – which would prove well-founded – that the Taliban members would return to the fight against the West.

Of the five — Mohammad Fazl, the former Taliban army chief of staff; Khairullah Khairkhwa, a Taliban intelligence official; Abdul Haq Wasiq, a former Taliban government official; and Norullah Noori and Mohammad Nabi Omari — at least three have attempted to reconnect with their old comrades, a source told Fox News.

Bergdhal was promoted to sergeant while in captivity, and had accrued more than $200,000 in back pay by the time he was freed.

The Obama administration’s incoming communications director said Wednesday the decision to trade Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders last year was the right move, hours after he was charged with desertion.

“Was it worth it? Absolutely,” Jen Psaki told Megyn Kelly on “The Kelly File.” “We have a commitment to our men and women serving in the military, defending our national security every day, that we’re going to do everything to bring them home if we can, and that’s what we did in this case.”

Jarabh was captured in 2002 as he fled the mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was believed to be hiding out after the 9/11 attacks.

Now, a federal parole board has cleared Jarabh to be transferred out of Gitmo, calling him a “low-level” fighter.

He had previously been classified as a “forever detainee,” meaning he was deemed too dangerous for release, but evidence for prosecution was insufficient.

According to Herridge, analysts believe the Obama administration is now accepting more risk that detainees will return to terror activities as it ramps up its efforts to further empty the prison and shut it down before the president leaves office.

The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency recently testified to Congress that the terror recidivism rate is at 18% among Guantanamo transfers in the last 4-5 years.

She said in almost all of the recent transfers, there have been no meaningful restrictions on the freed detainees once they arrive in a third country.

Herridge said about 122 detainees are left at Gitmo, with 50 cleared for transfer. The administration, she reports, is said to be trying to reduce the population under 100 so the remaining detainees can be moved to a U.S. federal prison.

Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei called for “Death to America” on Saturday, a day after President Barack Obama appealed to Iran to seize a “historic opportunity” for a nuclear deal and a better future, and as US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed substantial progress toward an accord.

Khamenei told a crowd in Tehran that Iran would not capitulate to Western demands. When the crowd started shouting, “Death to America,” the ayatollah responded: “Of course yes, death to America, because America is the original source of this pressure.

“They insist on putting pressure on our dear people’s economy,” he said, referring to economic sanctions aimed at halting Iran’s nuclear program. “What is their goal? Their goal is to put the people against the system,” he said. “The politics of America is to create insecurity,” he added, referring both to US pressure on Iran and elsewhere in the region.

“It is necessary to praise the martyrs and to keep them from being forgotten, and to keep the ethical values [embodied by] their memory from becoming obsolete. Gatherings that honor the martyrs are in effect a continuation of the movement of jihad and martyrdom. Every day in Iranian society, we must disseminate the martyrs’ memory, and the milestones of their lives. If the memory of the martyrs and the value of martyrdom are presented in society as eternal truth, defeat loses its meaning, and this nation will move fearlessly along the path of progress.

…

“It is vital to keep the martyrs’ names and the culture of martyrdom alive. This is one of the country’s basic needs. The culture of martyrdom is a culture of self-sacrifice for the sake of long-term goals – goals shared by the entire nation and by all mankind. This culture is precisely the opposite of Western individualist culture, that measures everything according to individual and material considerations. If the culture of sacrifice and martyrdom spreads through a society, that society will progress and will never stop or retreat.”

Addressing a February 26, 2015 ceremony attended by families of Iranian martyrs who fell on the Syrian front, Ali Shirazi, Khamenei’s representative in the IRGC’s Qods Force, said:

“We will stand fast against the world of arrogance. We will not rest until we have raised the banner of Islam over the White House. The Islamic nation is determined to enter the arena with all its force, backed by God’s will and his grace, and to stand fast against the world of arrogance. They will not suppress us with sanctions and threats. You did not succeed in harming the regime on the day it emerged, and now that the regime is 36 years old, you, the enemies of Islam, must expect and realize that every day [you] will be beaten, across the world.”

(CNN)At least a dozen tourists on two cruises that visited the Tunisian capital, Tunis, are among more than 20 people who were gunned down this week at the country’s Bardo National Museum, officials said.

Details of the victims in Wednesday’s attack have been slow to emerge. Some of the bodies remained unidentified at a morgue, a forensic official said Friday.

(CNN) The Sunni terror group ISIS purportedly claimed it committed Friday’s bombings that killed scores of people at two mosques frequented by Shiite rebels in Yemen’s capital — an attack that would mark ISIS’s first large-scale attack in the Arabian Peninsula country.

At least 137 people were killed and 357 wounded when suicide bombers, pretending to be disabled and hiding explosives under casts, attacked the mosques in Sanaa, according to Yemen’s state-run Saba news agency.

Five million dollars — that’s how much an Afghan official was worth in ransom money to al Qaeda. And in 2010, the Afghan government struck a deal with the terror organization, paying the $5 million price tag to free the diplomat.

But according to a New York Times report Saturday, at least $1 million of the ransom money was from U.S. funds provided by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Times reports that in order to collect the money necessary to liberate Abdul Khaliq Farahi, the Afghan emissary who was kidnapped by al Qaeda in 2008, the country looked to a “secret fund bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul.”

Several Afghan officials involved in the episode confirmed to the newspaper that their government “had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.”

Recent evidence suggesting that the intelligence agency did indeed partly finance the ransom emerged in a New York trial of a Pakistani al Qaeda fighter, Abid Naseer, the Times reports.

Evidence from the trial included Osama bin Laden’s correspondence referencing the payment. The correspondence was taken from the computers and documents that Navy SEALs seized in the 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound.

The previously classified letters, made public once entered into evidence in court, contained exchanges that hinted at the overseas source for the funds.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, al Qaeda’s general manager, wrote in a letter to bin Laden in June 2010.

But bin Laden warned that the U.S. was possibly setting a trap for the militant fighters, knowing where the money was being sent.

“There is a possibility — not a very strong one — that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” the al Qaeda leader responded, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”